Friday, March 12, 2010

As you may have heard, "Avatar" picked up the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, which extended the streak of The VFX Predictinator correctly predicting the winner of that category to its twenty-first year. In this post, we showed you our prediction for 2009:

The obvious response from someone who hasn't followed our work on the Predictinator is, "well, of course 'Avatar' won this category. It was a shoo-in." Well, maybe it was, but it illustrated that The VFX Predictinator works.

Friday, March 05, 2010

Los Angeles, February 28, 2010 - The Visual Effects Society announced the winners of the 8th Annual VES Awards tonight at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California. The annual event recognizes outstanding visual effects in more than twenty categories of film, animation, television, commercials and video games.

Filmmakers, producers and guests joined more than a thousand attendees from the visual effects industry for the sold-out gala which honored James Cameron with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award and Dr. Ed Catmull with the Georges Méliès Award for Pioneering.

Avatar was the evening’s big winner taking home six awards including Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture. The animated feature film Up was honored with three awards including Outstanding Animation in an Animated Feature Motion Picture.

The 2010 VES Awards will premiere on Friday, March 5 at 10pm ET/PT on REELZCHANNEL.

And here are all of the winners of the live-action feature film categories. (To see all the nominees, click here.) Congratulations to all the winners!

Having an Oscar party this weekend? Want to liven things up with a pool? If so, use this ballot I created for my Oscar party.

Every year I create a special ballot based on the oscar.com printable ballot -- but on my ballot, each category has a different point value. The highest valued category is "Best Picture," while the mainstream films' categories are valued at two points. The non-mainstream categories (like the documentary and short film categories) are valued at one point.

This way, in a tight race for the winner, the winner most likely would not be determined by the non-mainstream films (i.e., blind guesses).

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Finally, it's time to answer the two burning questions that result from the creation of the 100% accurate-for-20-years VFX Predictinator. First, can the Predictinator be tweaked and used to predict other categories? And second, which film will bring home Oscar for visual effects this year according to the Predictinator?

Could this formula, or at least the ideas behind the formula, work for predicting other categories? In fact, I think this formula, with some tweaking, could work very well in the other 'craftsman'-type categories, particularly the sound and sound effects editing Oscar, since expensive, well-made, and popular films are usually nominated in the sound categories.

However, I cannot say the same for acting categories, writing or directing, or even cinematography and editing. There is no way to predict the randomness of a breakthrough performance or a particular film. I mean, Marisa Tomei won an Oscar for a Joe Pesci comedy. Who could have predicted that? And a non-winning "American Idol" contestant (Jennifer Hudson) won an Oscar for "Dreamgirls" in her very first film performance. What quantifiable data could possibly support that prediction? On the same wavelength, who could have predicted the awards success of 2004's "Crash," directed by Paul Haggis? Certainly when a filmmaker like Eastwood, Spielberg or Scorsese is in the running, their quantifiable chances certainly improve, since they have a significant body of work that can be numerically tracked (for acclaim, box office, etc). There simply exist far too many chances for breakthrough Academy Award victories, which makes numerically predicting them virtually impossible.

And now, it's time to reveal the Predictinator values of the 2009 contenders for the Academy Award for visual effects. And the nominees are "Avatar," "District 9," and "Star Trek." Let's see what the Predictinator thinks:

As you can see, "Avatar" ended up with a Predictinator score of 8.03, with "District 9" geetting 6.36, and "Star Trek" earning 4.61.

The 2009 films share, unlike most years, near-universal love from the critics. All three films earned over 82% on the Tomatometer, which hasn't happened since 1995, when both "Babe" and "Apollo 13" earned rave reviews. But that's where the similarities between this year's three nominees end. The box office tally was overwhelmingly dominated by the cultural phenomenon that was "Avatar." It also earned heavy points in the Month of Release criteria (December) and additional Oscar nominations (9 total).

"District 9" puts up a good fight against "Avatar" on two significant fronts, since the films both shared organic characters as their primary visual effects, and both featured facial acting amongst those characters. But the other important criteria gives "Avatar" a Predictinator-predicted victory.

Of course, we'll revisit the Predictinator's success after the Oscars on March 7, and see if its streak of accuracy can be continued into its 21st consecutive year. And here it is.

FXRant by Todd Vaziri

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About Me

my name is todd vaziri and i do stuff. you can electronically mail me feedback at tvaziri@gmail.com.
this blogy thingy is just a big experiment, so we'll see how it goes. you'll see posts on film, visual effects, media, current events, and whatever gibberish is floating in my melon.